DAY ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE – Mark Robinson

Mr. Duncan-Smith Dreaming In The Sun

A man is knocking down a high brick wallonly to rebuild it further from the swollen river,each brick re-finding its original neighbour,the wall somehow more massive than before.

Torrential rain from a bright sky,though the ground is bone.Days of rain upon the man and the wall in minutesmake him pace back and forth and change tack.

Now he is smashing the bricks, bagging the bits,piling the bags in a line, then a stack, then, well, a wall.The water laps against the bags, soaks them dull.The earth is a footprint set hard and sharp.

There are children up on roofs, arms out,shadowing helicopters and planes,smudge-faced children down in the dirtscratching for tools of make believe.

There are parents looking for their children,good parents looking for naughty and nice alike.The motives of others, says the voiceover,the unfathomable motives of others.

Mark Robinson’s New & Selected Poems, How I Learned to Sing was published in 2013 by Smokestack Books and selected for New Writing North’s ‘Read Regional’ library promotion in 2014. His poem ’The Infinite Town’ was commissioned in 2014 to be carved into a large plinth on Stockton High Street. (You can see it here:CLbAx1WW8AQiWfS.jpg:large) He founded the cultural consultancy Thinking Practice in 2010, and has since worked with nearly 100 organisations in the UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa. He writes regularly on culture and cultural policy, at www.thinkingpractice.co.uk/blog/

New Boots – the Anthology!

A selection of 100 poems from the project is now available in book form from Smokestack (price £8.99) - go here to order.

"Why the devil I throw my money away for that which the blockheads wish?" (G.F. Handel)

Welcome poets, polemicists and the disbelieving masses

The 2015 General Election made manifest the great sea-change that had been occurring in UK politics over the last fifteen to twenty years. Previous certainties, like Labour’s Scottish hegemony, are no more. Older patterns, like Conservative dominance of England, reasserted themselves.

The idea of the UK as a single country has been replaced by a plurality of identities, some long known to the other countries and regions, others formulating themselves as time passes. For that reason, we thought it might be an interesting experiment to chart the responses of those unacknowledged legislators, the poets, over the first 100 days of the new dispensation.

We ended up publishing a poem a day for 138 days, each one responding to some aspect of the new unrealpolitik. We then set to editing a book of 100 poems in order to, as we thought then, conclude the project.

However, the results of the EU Referendum showed that the slow slew in British political identity toward disillusionment and division had reached a breaking point that made even more evident the contrasts already indicated by the Scottish referendum and the General Election. We felt we had to begin again...

Stay with us, and see what the hell happens next. Oh fuck, it's Trump.

Commissioning and Contributions

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